In Chaplin’s speech, he quoted the Gospel of Luke, which I think is so much better than John 3:16.
“The kingdom of God is in your midst”
I’ve got a ticket to ride. Gettin’ up at 4:00am to be there when Congress opens tomorrow. I’ll be meeting with Marsha, Lambert and some of the other Correntians. If I’m not mistaken, Lambert is also planning a Virtually Speaking broadcast with Avedon Carol tomorrow night at 9:00 EST so be sure to check that out.
If you would like to help defray the cost of the trip, please see the donate button to the upper left side of the screen. We should have just enough in the PayPal account to cover it but it never hurts to plan for unexpected incarcerations and bail. Recommended donation is $10.17. I’d like to say thank you to all of you who have contributed. It means a lot to me.
So, I will be packing my chargers tonight and turning in early to get up even earlier.
For those of you who want to hear more Charlie Chaplin, here is the entirety of his speech from The Dictator. He wrote this himself. Enjoy!
I have a post knocking around in my head about the after effects of the 2008 election season on women but it’s not quite there yet. In the meantime, add me to the growing list of admirers of Stephan Colbert’s, sorry, JON STEWART’S SuperPAC ad. For those of you who missed it last week, Colbert gave up his PAC to his business partner, Stewart, when he decided to form an exploratory committee to run for the President of South Carolina. As the owner of a SuperPAC, legally he can’t coordinate it with his campaign committee or even know what it’s up to but he can transfer ownership of the PAC to his business partner and if they chat now and again about stuff and it looks like the two entities share the same vision, that’s merely coincidental.
Anyway, here’s the ad:
So, let’s talk briefly about the pros of this ad. What I like the most about this ad was that it expresses in 30 seconds what I have been trying to say less successfully for a couple of years now. There is a place for corporations in the American business landscape and we don’t need to always be hostile to them. Those corporations are not people but they are made up of people. Those people make the widgets or build the cars or design the airbuses or discover the drugs. To do and build on this scale requires teams of people, working together, and sometimes, this just works more efficiently when they work in a corporate environment. It’s like a department store where everyone needs what’s in the everyone else’s department. For example, you can’t do drug discovery very easily outside of a corporation. Those of us who are out of corporate settings realize that the level of coordination and high start up costs, coupled with the reluctance of banks to lend and vulture capitalists to invest, make new drug discovery companies very risky propositions.
Colbert doesn’t take any shots at those people who work for corporations. The left could take a lesson from that. He is not offending anyone who due to the circumstances of where they live or what their talents are, end up working for corporations. Those people are not evil and they shouldn’t feel any shame for not being able to build a car or develop a drug all by themselves or with a couple of friends in a garage. The “you ought to be ashamed for working for {{insert nasty corporation here}}” attitude is thick in the left blogosphere. It is very offensive. Yes, I think that most of the lefties who have this attitude, especially those who want desperately to fit in, have no idea how incredibly offensive they can be. And insulting. Did I mention that? Failure to discriminate the portions of a corporation that are responsible for all the pain and suffering from the people who are suffering, including some of the corporation’s workers, leads to a lot of resentment towards the left from people who should be its allies. Over and over again, the left’s insistence on moral purity alienates it from the very people they say they want to help. It’s not helping, guys. So, stop doing it. It’s insulting to condemn people who work for corporations –who are in the rank and file.
It’s quite another thing to be critical of the people who run corporations and seem to be in it only to enrich themselves or gain some kind of social status. THOSE people really do have a problem. But the average assembler, engineer, CADD designer or labrat? No, these people deserve your respect. Stephan Colbert gives it to them and puts the blame where it belongs- at the top of the corporate ladder.
Now, Colbert is taking well deserved pot shots at Romney. But I think we can see that down the road, he’s going to have a problem. Because Barack Obama is indistinguishable from the corporate overlords who yank his junk. In fact, this is the primary reason why I couldn’t support him. He is their creature. He is a schmoozer who rose to the presidency because he embraced the corporate executive culture. He adopted their values and their tactics. Do you think Obama is the first dude who rose to the top of an organization who had absolutely no idea what the business does for a living or how it operates? Heck no, the country’s corporations are stuffed to the gills with guys like that. Their prestigious Wharton B. School MBAs, Harvard law degrees, personal connections and ability to kiss ass, while cold bloodedly, unscrupulously and ruthlessly stabbing their competition, are their tickets to success. The fact that they run companies or governments where thousands or millions of people are dependent on good decision making is tangential to their personal goals and aspirations. Their success story doesn’t involve making a brilliant new product or turning around a struggling enterprise in a changing economy. It involves their own personal struggle and self actualization. They write books about the ascent of man told from their own intimate experience. They are testaments to rugged individualism in the boardroom and fortitude on the back nine. This is Obama’s reality. It has nothing to do with YOU. Why are you making unreasonable demands on him? Hasn’t he shown you the way to accomplishing your own dream? That’s what he was born to do: to make his own personal experience something that you can aspire to. That was the secret to his electoral success in 2008. He convinced a whole generation of Whole Foods shoppers that they were special people who could be the ambitious, intrepid masters of their own personal universes. Yes, You Can! Yes, You Can! {{rolling eyes}}.
There are other reasons to not want him for four more years as president, like, he’s not a good politician and he’s lousy at making policy. If you wanted someone who would have come to the White House prepared to make good policy and stick with core Democratic values, Hillary Clinton was your guy. According to Ron Suskind’s book, Confidence Men, Obama had no idea how to actually do policy. He has some kind of vision and then says to his minions, “Go do it!”. He gives them very little guidance beyond that. And that’s because he either doesn’t believe what his corporate overlords tell him not to believe or because he just doesn’t have the experience or interest to buckle down and concentrate on the task at hand.
Unfortunately, this is the person the Democrats keep saying (at this time) that they want in the White House for four more years. I am of the opinion that until the Democratic party is willing to sit down and negotiate with its voters, those voters would be well advised to go on strike. After all, we have zero influence over the Republicans. There’s nothing we can do or say that will ever have any effect on them. But we might be able to persuade Democrats that they will be in the political wilderness for a generation if they don’t get their shit together. And then, we should find a third party candidate to the left of the Democrats, it doesn’t matter who it is, and vote for that person. If Romney wins in November, I guarantee that you will not know the difference when it comes to who is occupying the White House, ask any of the thousands and thousands of laid off scientists who Obama ignored in the past 3 years while their corporate overlords slashed their way through the payrolls and pension funds to “enhance shareholder value” and their own bottom lines. Obama was an accomplice to the serial killing of the American scientific infrastructure. He was golf buddy to those homocidal maniacs. So, why reward the Democrats by voting for him? Congress is a different thing. I’d primary every incumbent congresscritter of either party with few exceptions.
Now, can Citizens for a Better Tomorrow Tomorrow craft an ad that takes on the Democrats? That remains to be seen. If the PAC is to be successful, it has to motivate Democrats to take action, it can’t simply be content to trash Republicans. Because when November rolls around, the Republicans will once again rile up its Christian conservative base to go to the polls. To go to the polls, you need motivation and Republicans seem to be highlighting “religious freedom” this year, as in, anything the Democrats propose will be an infringement on the rights of fundamentalist Christians with Fox induced Acquired Stupidity Syndrome to push their Old Testament tribalism on the rest of us who don’t give a damn. But right now, what is motivating Democrats to go to the polls? Having new, more vigorous blood in the party would motivate many of us Democrats in Exile.
The Confluence 